Polymer Distributed Bragg Reflectors for Vapor Sensing

Abstract

We establish a new strategy to achieve fast and responsive hybrid distributed Bragg reflectors for environmental vapor sensing. We fabricated easily processable zinc oxide–polystyrene nanocomposites to grow high quality multilayers with large gas permeability and dielectric contrast, which enable fast and sensitive detection of vapor analytes. Multilayers fabricated by simple spin-coating of the nanocomposite and cellulose acetate show a 10-fold enhancement of the optical response to toluene exposure compared to reference distributed Bragg reflectors built with bare polystyrene.